I mean, yeah America’s rightward spiral is depressing, especially if you live there. But it’s not exactly an American-exclusive phenomenon. Italy elected a far-right party, France might in their next Presidential election, and even Germany’s far-right party is surging in the polls. Honestly, I’m struggling to think of a country that hasn’t seen a massive rightward surge over the last few years.
In Australia we recently had a considerable shift towards progressive politics after a long ass run of conservative government. The centre right (moderate conservatives) were absolutely demolished in our last election in favour of progressive minor party candidates. Our centre ‘left’ party has certainly moved further to the right (this has been happening for a while now though) but they are having their asses handed to them by our progressive left party who is growing in popularity, especially with younger voters.
We are historically a very conservative country and I have no doubt we’ll eventually trend back towards this tradition. But for now I’m enjoying being the exception to the rest of the world.
What happened was, for the GOP, all their propaganda was made for the plebs. They knew it was all bullshit.
However after a generation you get a bunch of true believers whom were raised on Fox News and AM radio, and this is what happens.
Trump for example was never “in on” the propaganda, he was just a boring asshole that only watched Fox News and underage beauty pageants. So of course he’s a true believer. It’s also the reason why he resonates with his “base” because he literally talks like them on Facebook. Word for word sounded like some of my distant “kinfolk” and one of the reasons why I ditched Facebook. It’s literally “he’s like me frfr” except everything that matters ie rich, coastal elite.
The only way to get his cult to back off would be if he said he was a Democrat now.
There’s a theory that societies experience 40 years of progress followed by 40 years of regression in an endless cycle. I hope the theory is wrong. I can’t take decades of these idiots running things.
And it’s happening in a lot of other countries - here in the UK the political culture is more right-wing than any time since at least the Second World War (and that’s saying something).
It’s Late Stage Capitalism: in order to continue business as usual in the face of all reason and evidence of its devastating effects, capitalists look to authoritarianism and fascism to ensure capitalism’s continuation.
Right cause the US is the only country with racists in power lol
